I've replayed this game probably more than any other. Part of that is familiarity – I grew up with Baldur's Gate and know its story and systems back to front, so there are absolutely no barriers to entry when picking it up again. That, however, is not the biggest draw. It's not really build variety either. While there are plenty of classes and kits to choose from for your main character, ultimately you will still end up with a party comprising some combination of fighers, mages, healers and ulitily. What makes the game special is the personalities that come alongside those mechanical considerations. This is where Bioware really mastered how to make the player care about RPG companions.
Baldur's Gate is in some ways like an extremely complicated version of Pokemon. You pick your six little guys and go at it. There's a big cast to choose from and you won't be able to take them all. Your party needs to be well-rounded, able to tackle the various obstacles and encounters you have to face. There is fun to be had levelling up your toons and aquiring the gear that will make them into god-like beings that can take on other god-like beings.
But it's the personalities that matter. Character and mechanics interact in ways that present the player with interesting choices. Not everyone gets along – characters with a good alignment will have trouble tolerating characters who are evil, to the point where one may leave or start a fight with another. Keldorn is an experienced paladin who can wield the most powerful sword in the game, but will not abide being in a party with Viconia, an evil drow cleric with a valuable amount of magic resistance. You can't have both in the party for very long. Generally the good companions tend to be dual or multi-classed – they trade in raw power for versatility. The evil companions are more focused on realising the full potential of their specific class, and so tend to be more simple to use out of the box. Either way, there are at least two playthroughs of the game you can do with a completely different set of tools to address its challenges.
It helps that the characters you get are fun to hang out with. This is an old game – its innovations have become part of the modern CRPG landscape, but features like party conflicts, romances and player strongholds may feel embryonic to a modern player. The companions in the first Baldur's Gate are extremly lightly sketched – being little more than a portrait, a collection of barks and a paragraph of backstory. The game was designed to transpose the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop experience into a single-player computer game, and that's about as much information a tabletop group would need before they meet in a bar and go hunt for gold and experience in a dungeon.
After the release of Baldur's Gate, the developer discovered that players were actually quite attached to the companions they had created. forgoing ones that became available later because of the investment put into those that were available earlier. When making the sequel, they made sure that companions rewarded that investment and had more stuff to say and do throughout the game. Companions talk a lot more in Shadows of Amn, not just with you but between each other. One of the joys of replaying the game is seeing the interactions that crop up between party members, some of which can be quite unexpected. Two companions can start a relationship when in your party. Korgan, in many ways a deplorable bloodthirsty dwarf, nonetheless expresses admiration for the upstanding Keldorn and his skill in battle.
They are also very funny. In this playthrough I took the gnome Jan with me for the first time, who is a kind of jester figure – constantly telling meandering stories that inevitably circle back to his obsession with turnips. But there is more going on under the surface. A bit like the fool in a Shakespeare play, Jan is subtle when deploying his japes. His tall tales can be a way of puncturing the pretences of other characters while maintaining plausible deniability (just about) . If you have the knights Keldorn and Anomen in the party, Jan will be quite merciless in skewering each of them in turn – those exchanges are some of the funniest bits of writing I have seen in an RPG.
Jan's companion quest is quite short, but reveals a completely new facet to his character. When he discovers a former lover is in trouble, the jokes stop completely and he becomes a tragic romantic figure. There are nuances to many of the other characters you take with you. Jaheira has to deal with the death of her husband, but also the schemes and betrayals of her superiors in the organisation she works for. Her strong sense of direction is unmoored by her association with you, which is complicated further if you decide to become romantically involved. Eventually her stern demeanour breaks apart and she even starts enjoying a joke or two. Anomen is an arrogant wannabe knight who excels in giving exactly the wrong advice in every situation. Helping him pass his trial and resolve his daddy issues can make him into less of an idiot, and lead him to eventually apologise for his behaviour. Keldorn is a veteran of many struggles against evil, but you learn that in the course of performing his duties he has neglected his family. That leads to an agonising choice for the player – granting his request to retire and spend time with his loved ones, or retain his extremely valuable skills. I insisted he remained in my service, but had to live with the knowledge that I was effectively breaking up a family as a result.
Some of these characters were directly drawn from the developers' own D&D tabletop games – they were thought about and refined over time, which may have helped add unexpected dimensions to them. As players would have been familiar with the tropes of the genre, there was an attempt to subvert stereotypes. Korgan is an axe-wielding barbarian, sure, but he is also a poet with a talent for turning a phrase and engaging in ethical debates with his more upstanding fellow-travellers. Baldur's Gate sets the floor for what good writing and characterisation should be in CRPGs. Planescape: Torment, a game from the same era and made in the same engine, probably still sets the ceiling 20+ years on. The band between them is what we should expect from the genre.
Baldur's Gate has one advantage over Planescape in that its combat is a bit more sophisticated. The first Baldur's Gate game is a low-level D&D adventure – your party will be swinging and missing a lot, and you will be killed by wolves and bears while out in the wilderness if you're not careful. That in itself provides a certain amount of challenge and interest for the player (although I imagine some may also find it frustrating). Shadows of Amn carries on the story and banks the experience you would have gained in the first game – you now have a mid-level party with more spells and abilities at your disposal. The monsters you fight also have their immunities and quirks to contend with.
The Pokemon comparison kind of works here as well, in that what is a simple game of rock-paper-scissors matching a strong element against a weak one becomes a complicated game where your party has to counter the various abilities and buffs of your enemies. Mages are particularly tricky, throwing up protection spells that can make weapons useless and turn spells against you. The game rewards a thorough knowledge of the spell book (and there are a lot of spells in Baldur's Gate), as that is what will allow you to circumvent the problem magic users pose. Mage duels ultimately become a game of wits, where you rifle through your collection of spells to try and disrupt and defeat your opponent.
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Combat in Baldur's Gate is often quite short. The game doesn't waste your time with mobs or enemies that have giant healthpools. The point of an encounter is not to provide some friction on the journey to fulfilling a quest, but to set up a challenge and ask you to work out how to resolve it. Some encounters feel impossible until you figure out a way around them. Beholders, a prestige enemy in D&D (and an excellent monster design), can be devastating, casting extremely disruptive spells at you very, very quickly. Mind Flayers, another famous D&D enemy, are even scarier, being very resistant to magic and able to kill you very fast if you engage them in melee. These are unfair fights if you fight them fairly. Finding ways to trivialise them is very satisfying. The game rewards an understanding of its systems, not just the determination to grind enough levels to make you strong enough to attempt its fiercest challenges.
Baldur's Gate is slightly less successful when it comes to using the environment as part of encounter design. Maps are basically flat, and the main variable is the shape they come in. There are some tricks you can pull. The ground floor of the De'Arnise Keep, an early-game dungeon, allows you to snipe the trolls in the great hall from balconies. Mind Flayers are usually found in dungeons with long corridors, allowing you to block them up with summons and keep your party safe from their brain-devouring abilities. Rogues are designed to excel at underhand tactics. Attacking from the shadows behind an enemy gives you a 'backstab' damage multiplier. They can also set traps, so you can bait enemies to follow you down to an ambush and then blow them up. Both manoevers are quite fiddly to execute, however. In practice, the simple formula of having tanks in the front and mages at the back is usually enough.
One of the cool things about Baldur's Gate is that everyone plays by the same rules. If you kill an enemy that is using a valuable item, you will be able to loot it afterwards. Mages have only so many spells – exhaust them all and they become defenceless. You can stumble across enemies willy nilly and trade barbs before the fight starts if you like, but you can also be smart and scout ahead unseen, and launch a pre-emptive strike. All these tactics become essential for veterans who know the game well and play at higher difficulties. Baldur's Gate systems are robust enough to still provide a challenge in successive playthroughs.
But as I wrote at the beginning, that isn't really why I come back to these games. My latest run was done on normal difficulty and I became obscenely powerful about half-way through. Building up my team to be absolute beasts was rewarding, but the real delight came from the fondness I built up for the companions I took with me. That's what will keep me coming back for more.
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